For a girl who’d never before owned even one dress, but only cast-off shirts and trousers, beggar’s rags, choosing between two new and filmy dresses with low cut bodices and gilded laces was no small challenge. When she’d donned the blue one and was padding down the Aphrodisia House’s stairs, male laughter was already rising over the raucous strains of music from the downstairs saloon.
And tucked beneath that dress, tightly bound with a scarf to her thigh, was the other thing she’d found on the beach that night, the weapon she hadn’t shown to Zip, the weird artifact from the sea that Merricat had squinted at, frowned over, and told Shawme that she’d better keep.
The guard was changing in Sanctuary, and nowhere were the winds of chaos more keenly felt than in the Mageguild.
Even Merricat, who hadn’t been an apprentice very long before pillars of fire uptown had signalled the coming of the New Era, knew that. She could see it in the faces of the adepts, in the hunched shoulders of the handsome, mysterious and nameless First Hazard.
She could feel it in her classroom sessions when a real mage was teaching, as Randal was this evening. Usually, when Randal taught the gathered apprentices, Merricat found herself daydreaming. She’d watch Randal’s freckled face and envision it gazing fondly on her in some secluded bower to which he’d whisked her for private lessons. She’d stare at his prodigious ears and taste what it would be like to nibble them. She’d meditate on the strong arms of the warrior-mage in his adept’s robes and wonder what it would be like to feel them around her.
But not tonight. Tonight even Randal-who always made Merricat feel calm and safe and less afraid of being exposed as an untalented imposter among the students-even Randal seemed tense and wan.
The lesson was in progress, though, and Merricat tried hard to concentrate.
“. . . go to your trances, and then we’ll start adventuring up among the planes. On each plane we visit, you’ll have time to look around, meet denizens. When you meet a denizen, be sure to remember its name. The eventual object of this lesson,” Randal said in a sharp voice that forced Merricat’s attention away from daydreams, away from schemes to get Randal alone on pretext of discussing Shawme’s plight, away from everything . . .
“. . . the object is, eventually, to reach the twelfth plane, where you will encounter a spirit guide, a connection to help you negotiate among netherworld powers. This is magic of the most potent sort, magic of the kind that will stay with you lifelong and determine even your afterlife. It has nothing to do with mundane spells failing, with irate harridans complaining about inefficacious love potions-”
The score of students tittered.
Randal continued. “This is profound business. Some of you will make this journey slowly, in stages. Some will only partly complete it during this term. But to be truly an adept, you must in your lifetime journey to the twelfth plane, conquer all that stands in your way to do so, and there meet your guide face to face. Your guide is your representative where feet cannot tread. It is privy to knowledge you otherwise cannot tap, to power you’ll never wield on your own.”
A hush fell over the students. Randal’s voice had deepened even further. In his fighter’s tunic and dark pants, he was the picture of a field mage, so much more suited to this lesson than some soft adept in a festooned robe of power. When Randal leaned forward, his neck outthrust, his eyes raking their ranks, no one even shifted in surprise at the words he spoke next.
“Class,” Randal said in a suddenly softened voice that signalled his most intense concern for their welfare. “This is a lesson not without its dangers. Afterwards, there will be no teasing among you, no bravado from those who proceed faster toward those who go slowly. All of you are about to risk your sanity and mortal persons among the planes. Go cautiously, go with determination, and go with my blessing.” He straightened up.
A murmur ran through the students.
When it subsided, Randal said, “And now, if you’ll all put your feet flat on the floor, hands flat on your thighs, I’m going to guide your trances.”
As Randal ran through the relaxation litany, Merricat let his voice be her beacon. When he instructed her right hand to rise, of its own accord, from her lap and hover before her face, it seemed that her hand was indeed weightless. And when he told her to open her eyes and behold the manna of her person, she was unsurprised to see a green nimbus surrounding her fingers, to see the bones beneath the skin, and to see blue lightning spurting from her fingertips.
When she was instructed to close her eyes again, they closed without her volition. When she was told that her hand would now fall to her thigh and when it did, she would open her eyes and see the first plane around her, she was not afraid.
Until her hand hit her thigh. Then Merricat was plunged into vertigo and if she could, she would have grabbed onto her chair. But she could not. Her body was under RandaFs control, not her own. When the snap of his fingers caused her eyes to open, she beheld a landscape windwhipped and strange, stretching forever in all directions, where hills had crests like frozen waves and trees were perfect spheres. Beneath those trees were others and she knew (without knowing how she knew) that some of those others were her fellow students.
She knew because she was under one such tree and beside her were creatures part human, part not. One creature came toward her in wide strides, staring at her through one burning round eye, cocking the head of a falcon and saying through the beak of a bird: “Welcome, Merricat, to the first plane. What is it you seek here?”
“Knowledge,” said Merricat as she’d been coached in RandaFs lesson. “Friends. Power of mind.”
The beak of the bird grew large and from it came the words, “There are no friends for you on the first plane, as there are no friends for you at Aphrodisia House. You must seek higher. Here, as there, you will find only tools.”
“Give me one, then,” she heard her own voice say, and was appalled at her temerity,
The bird head nodded and the bird beak came close.
She wanted to shy away from the sharp beak but she could not. Her palm extended and the beak neared the soft offering of her flesh. And into her palm it dropped an insect, like a wasp. The insect tickled her palm and on her flesh, with many legs, it danced. And as it danced, a wasp’s nest came into being and into it, the wasp soon crawled.
Then Merricat’s hand became very heavy and the next thing she knew, it had fallen to her lap, for Randal’s voice was saying, “•• . . at the count of three, your spirit will return to your body and your eyes will open and you will be in your seat beside your fellow students.”
It was as if the adept spoke only to her. She listened only to his voice as again dizziness overcame her. She was flying through clouds of many colors, among ancient seas, and farther.
When she found her body, she felt absolutely sucked into it and her spirit came to rest in its prison with a thud that was her hand hitting her thigh.
Her eyes opened. She blinked. The students around her were all palefaced, white-lipped, and silent. No one looked at anyone else. But Merricat looked at her hand on her thigh.
In the palm of her hand was a red blotch about the size of the small wasp’s nest. The hair rose all over her body. Surely this must mean something, or else she’d done it all wrong . . , What connection could the first plane have to Shawme’s plight and the thing she’d told her friend to keep secret?
She was shaking, trembling all over. Her skin was blotchy, red and fishy white.
She didn’t hear the rest of the lesson, she just heard Randal’s voice, the only comfort in her universe which now was no comfort at all.
She had to tell the adept what she’d done, how she’d failed, and find out what the omen meant. She had to.
When the class filed out, her throat constricted: what if Randal left before the last of the students were gone? She couldn’t chase him down the halls, or sortie to his private chamber where real magic was always under way. She just couldn’t.
But Randal was surrounded by other questioners, excited voices asking about what they’d seen on the first plane. Merricat waited until all but two of them were gone and then walked slowly up the row toward the front of the study hall.